1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for reducing the occurrence frequency of a well-known phenomenon called xe2x80x9cbuffer under runxe2x80x9d (hereinafter referred to as BURN). In particular, the present invention relates to a method which takes advantage of the difference between the data transmitting speed of a host system and the writing speed of a CD drive to optimize the writing speed of the CD drive so as to reduce the occurrence frequency of BURN and to improve the writing quality and efficiency of the disk.
2. Description of the Prior Art
FIG. 1 is a simple schematic illustrating the writing of data from a host system (e.g., a computer) to a disk that is placed inside a CD drive. The data is transmitted from the host system to the CD drive, where the data is temporarily stored in a buffer zone. When there is sufficient data in the buffer zone, the CD drive writes the data onto the disk. As the writing speed of the CD drive is increased, the data transmitting speed of the host system must be increased correspondingly in order to achieve the best writing quality and efficiency. However, not all host systems will operate at data transmitting speeds that can follow the writing speed of the CD drive. Once the host system""s data transmitting speed becomes lower than the CD drive""s writing speed, the data that is temporarily stored in the buffer zone of the CD drive will be used up (i.e., written to the disk) faster than the host system can transmit data. This is the xe2x80x9cbuffer under runxe2x80x9d phenomenon, which can lead to write failure.
A number of attempts have been made to address the BURN problem. Some of these technologies, such as BURN Proof, Just Link, and Super Link, can continue the writing operation from the CD drive to the disk even when BURN occurs so as to avoid write failure. In general, a CD drive equipped with BURN Proof, Just Link or Super Link is able to continue writing data to the disk when BURN occurs by utilizing the following operation process: when data is transmitted from the host system to the buffer zone of the CD drive, the amount of data in the buffer zone will be increased, but the writing operation is not yet started. When the amount of the received data in the buffer zone reaches a certain critical value, the writing operation will be started, and at this time, the data in the buffer zone will be slowly consumed as the data is written to the disk. If the data in the buffer zone is completely used up (i.e., all the data in the buffer zone has been written to the disk), the writing operation will be stopped. The writing operation will be restarted when the amount of data in the buffer zone has been accumulated to the critical level again.
Unfortunately, a serious problem experienced by such technologies is that the written data on the disk will contain a large number of xe2x80x9clinkxe2x80x9d points which are the points where the writing operation is stopped and re-started. Although the written data can be read, written data with numerous xe2x80x9clinkxe2x80x9d points is still undesirable because these xe2x80x9clinkxe2x80x9d points may lead to gaps (i.e., destroyed data) in the data. Thus, no matter what technology is used, it is difficult to completely avoid deterioration in the writing quality.
The larger the difference between the writing speed and the host system""s data transmitting speed, the more frequently BURN will occur. As a result, the disk""s writing quality will be negatively impacted, and the time that is actually taken for writing data to a disk will be much longer than the writing time in the case when no BURN occurs.
Therefore, there still remains a need for a method that minimizes the BURN problems described above.
It is an object of the present invention is to provide a method that reduces the frequency of the occurence of the BURN phenomenon.
In order to accomplish the objects of the present invention, the present invention provides a method of minimizing the occurrence of buffer under run, which includes calculating the transmission speed of data from a host to a disk drive, adjusting the writing speed of the disk drive to a disk based on the transmission speed, and writing the data from the disk drive to the disk at the adjusted writing speed.